8
Jan
2008
The Mac
Every blogger has one, right? It comes with the title. The hip cool blogger guy with his mac running OS X. The business man running Windows. Everyone has seen at least one of the mac commercials by now.
Except there is something different about my mac. It can’t watch those videos. It’s too damned slow. It’s a 7 year old ibook running a G3. It can’t watch youtube video. It has troubles with word processing at times. Which is why I’m only using TextEdit.
Single core, PowerPC, 500MHz. 320MB of RAM, 10 gig hard drive running 10.3. Slowly. At best. But it runs. And it was cheap. And it’s a laptop.
In CS 136 today the prof was looking for someone with a PPC mac and I was the only person to have one. At all. And I know like 4 people with macs myself.
It takes over a minute, and it has been timed, to load the app we do our programming in. That’s quite the commitment just to try out a simple line of code. The temptation would be to keep it running at all times but if I keep it open all the time everything else will be even slower. Even the app to see how much memory and CPU I’m using takes more CPU time than it’s worth. 20-40% just monitoring itself.
At least I won’t get viruses right? right? Well since after typing in some programs and looking at the screen I can see the rest of my sentence come out well after I’m finished I’m tempted to say it has infected itself.
And it does crash, no matter what the commercials tell you. Programs randomly crash, the OS itself has frozen on me several times saying “an error has occurred, please restart your computer to fix it.” Better or worse than a BSOD? I like to be able to debug my problems.
I think I’ll stop the mac rant right there. It’s pretty but it doesn’t live up to the ‘perfect’ machine that everyone expects. Maybe better than windows, but not perfect.
I wrote this on my mac.